Posts Tagged ‘full throttle’

This week I’ve been trying to think about a relationship between a man and a woman in a game where they become close, but don’t actually have romantic involvement or a silly damsel in distress situation. There’s a strange set up that is echoed throughout our culture that [heterosexual] men and women can’t be friends, just like in Billy Crystal’s famous speech in When Harry Met Sally. ‘You realise of course that we can never be friends. …Men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.’ ‘I have a number of men friends…’ ‘They all wanna have sex with you. No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.’

Well BILLY CRYSTAL. Why don’t we start up Full Throttle and prove you wrong you silly Monsters Inc-voicing maniac.

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I haven’t, you see. Well, I played the demo years and years ago, and I watched the cutscenes-stitched-into-a-movie version not quite so many years ago, but I’m very conscious that this 1995-made, 2040-set adventure is the big blindspot in my Lucasarts knowledge. I’m also aware that some people hail it as the studio’s most grown-up and impressive-on-a-level-beyond-just-funny hour. Given this is Grim Fandango re-release date, it seems timely to look back and wonder if Tim Schafer’s earlier, more leathery work deserves similarly modernising treatment.Read the rest of this entry »

In the second part of our interview with Double Fine‘s Tim Schafer (the first part is here), we get to talking about the nature of the adventure game, and reflect on some of Schafer’s defining classics from the 90s, Day Of The Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, to consider what lessons they offer for today, the reasons for avoiding 3D altogether, and I almost trick him into making a sequel to Day Of The Tentacle.

This is so very good. It’s also been around for a couple of years, but this is the first time we’ve encountered it. Someone working under the name VGMD, cut together all the cinematics and key scenes from Full Throttle to create an hour-long ‘movie’ version.

As we lament the standards of storytelling and voice acting in many games, this stands as an example to all. It should be required viewing when people start a new game. “Oh!” they’d say as it finished, “It can be that good?” You can download the video from Gamers Hell here.

I would like to publically declare my love for Full Throttle. Something very strange happened with history and opinion on that game – it was well received by critics, it was completely fantastic, it was Tim Schafer’s most mature writing (three years before Grim Fandango). And then somehow it became the black sheep of LucasArts’ output, condemned by false memories of being too short, and having awful arcade sequences throughout. Which just isn’t true! Certainly it was a shorter adventure compared to others in their catalogue, but it was such an astonishingly fine one. And the arcade bits? Pieces of piss, apart from one crappy section with the demo derby. Get over it! Restore Full Throttle to its rightful glory! And then check out this excellent piece from Adventure Classic Gaming, discussing the fate of the two aborted sequels with former LucasArts artist, Bill Tiller.